


The Gardens of Procellarum

by genarti



Series: Lunar Base ABC [4]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, First Meetings, Gen, Kevin (sort of)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-03
Updated: 2014-08-03
Packaged: 2018-02-11 13:52:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2070741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/genarti/pseuds/genarti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A chance encounter on the Mare Cogitum.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Gardens of Procellarum

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PilferingApples](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PilferingApples/gifts).



> This is a birthday fic for PilferingApples -- Pilf, I hope it suits!

On the vast lunar plain of the Mare Cogitum, beyond the thick enclosing dome of Lunar Base ABC, two human figures could be seen. One was motionless, its atmo-suit lacking in visible personal touches (though possessed of several carefully customized features), a pale grey that would have blended with the rock dust save for the various insignia and safety marks upon it. The person inside was standing on a small rise pitted by ages' worth of meteor strikes, and watching the sky.

The other figure was moving over the lunar seabed in the light bounds of an experienced wanderer of the moon. She was Euphrasie Fauchelevent, called Cosette by everyone who knew her. She had decorated her suit with bright paint and glue-on patches, for an overall effect both eclectic and charming. When she saw the stranger she hesitated, considered, and then turned her leaps in the other's direction.

Cosette had come out here for solitude, but she was a sociable person by nature. Confronted with a stranger in her private time, she responded without a second thought by sending the figure an inquisitory ping, the atmo-suit equivalent of a polite door-chime. _Do you want company or conversation just now?_ said the beep, without words. She added in the briefest version of her public ID, after a moment to make a face about it. She had never felt like a Euphrasie, but it was what her birth record said, and there was no getting around that. At least without changing her name legally, and her mother had given her both Euphrasie and Cosette.

After a moment, her comm pinged in answer. Combeferre, Kevin, male, Senior Student of medicine and biochemistry, and a tacit affirmative answer in the presentation of that ID strip. His voice followed, a friendly alto. "Good air, Student Fauchelevent. I don't often see strangers out on the sea."

"Good air," she said, pleased he'd opened the voice comm. Text communication was fine, but she always second-guessed herself about how many emoticons to use with whom. You could hear a smile better. "Don't you? I wasn't sure – I'm new to the base, so I thought maybe I'd just missed the usual walking hours. It's so lovely outside the dome though."

"It is." She was close enough now to see him regarding her through the bubble of his helmet: a dark narrow face, which looked to her both thoughtful and amiable even through the distortion and shadow of an atmo-suit's faceplate. "You can't have come from Earth if you're out alone so soon."

Cosette was surprised into laughter. "Earth? Oh, no! Come on, does this look like an Earther's suit? I'd love to visit sometime – I'd love to see it, there's just so _much_ – but no, I've never been. I grew up out at Petit-Picpus Lab. Do you know it?"

"Of course," he said, surprising her again, and the more so with how he sounded faintly impressed. "They're the ones doing such good work with hydroponics, aren't they? Fruiting trees?"

"Why, yes! Yes, that's it exactly. Well, I grew up there, and it's so tiny there weren't the kind of entertainment centers you get here at the Base. We barely even had a school. So I'd go out on the sea all the time with my father, and then alone too once I was old enough, and look at the rocks and the sky. It's so restful. I can't understand why more people don't. ABC Base is lovely and exciting, but there's not much that's restful about it, is there?"

Student Combeferre turned to gaze up at the gibbous Earth. "I don't know if I'd call it restful," he said. "It's quiet, certainly, it's vast; it makes you think. That's very different, though."

Cosette had been the young pet of the lab, the new student at the formidably bustling ABC Base, the apple of her quiet father's eye. She had always been loved, but she had rarely been treated so seriously, especially by a stranger. It made her feel as if she had stepped into a suddenly silent room; she felt quite young and quite grown-up, all in the same moment. 

"Thought isn't restful?" she said.

"What do you think?"

"I suppose not." Cosette followed his gaze to Earth. She could see Australia, Antarctica, the curling tip of South America partly obscured by storms – all the shapes every schoolchild learned, at the same time as their map of the Moon and even before they learned their constellations. "It's restful to _not_ think very hard, when you're tired and you just want a silly novel or something. You're right, thinking's different."

He said nothing, but she could see a shifting shadow through his faceplate that she thought was a smile.

Cosette let the silence settle for a moment before she asked, "What do you think about out here, then?"

"Me?"

She grinned at him, though he couldn't necessarily see. The question hadn't been adorably startled the way Pontmercy in her philosophy class would have said it. It was a clarification, and taking her seriously again. "Who else is on the comm?"

Student Combeferre snorted slightly. "Plenty of things," he said. "As you said, quiet's often in short supply elsewhere. But I find it especially interesting to see the Earth from here. There's so much that's invisible."

Cosette reflected on that. In the familiar silence of her atmo-suit, when neither of them was speaking, all she could hear was her breathing, and her own pulse, and the quiet white-noise whisper every suit generated. "You're dodging the question. Well, that's all right, dodge if you want! I won't press. I don't understand, but I won't. Anyway you're right, all the same. It _is_ interesting. I always used to look up at it and think about my history lessons. You can't see the people from here – or the crops or the mines or the animals – you can't even see the countries, or the spaceports or anything. It's a different sort of distant than when everything's just words."

"Yes," he said. She felt that she was being weighed, though she didn't know to what end or by what rubric. She wondered what the result was. "Yes. It makes you think."

Cosette decided that when they got back inside, she was going to buy him a coffee and make him talk to her where she could see his face. It wasn't the kind of coffee-buying she had dragged Marius Pontmercy along for a few times (and, she hoped, a lot more times in the future) – the kind where you lapsed into silence for minutes on end to just watch the other person's eyelashes and blush pleasantly, and feel fizzy bubbles of happiness inside. This was a purely scientific interest. He seemed an interesting person – and he seemed like he was talking around his thoughts, too. Asking directly wouldn't get her anywhere, but observation might.

For the moment, she just watched the Earth hang glowing and mysterious in the sky above them. Its storms, its oceans, its wars and its laws and its lives, all faraway.

**Author's Note:**

> \- Oceanus Procellarum is the only lunar mare big enough to be called an ocean; the Mare Cogitum is at the edge of it. And the ABC Base is on the Mare Cogitum because I can't resist a chance for dumb puns.
> 
> \- If you guessed that this is the first conversation of what will later be Cosette's How I Joined The Amis story, you are correct. :D I'm not necessarily going to _write_ that story, but yeah, once her eyes have been opened a little more to political awareness she will be getting involved with things in this 'verse.


End file.
